Mr. DeGirolami is a law professor at the Catholic University of America who specializes in law and religion.
Justice Samuel Alito has been widely criticized this week for remarks he made to a self-described documentary filmmaker who on two occasions engaged him at social events, secretly taped him under false pretenses and released the recordings. What did he say that was wrong?
Nothing. None of his remarks was improper for a judge to make. Furthermore, he did not even say anything especially controversial — or at least nothing that would be controversial in a less polarized moment.
For those who have not heard the recording, here is what happened: Justice Alito assented to the filmmaker’s remark that the country is deeply polarized, and he said that given the depth of our disagreements over various issues and the inability to compromise on them, “one side or the other is going to win.” He stated that nevertheless “there can be a way of working, living together peacefully.”
He said that “American citizens in general need to work on this” — that is, polarization. But he said that solving polarization is not something that the Supreme Court can do, because “we have a very defined role, and we need to do what we’re supposed to do.” He added: “That is way above us.”
In perhaps the most discussed exchange, he assented to the filmmaker’s statement that it is important to win “the moral argument” and “return our country to a place of godliness.”
To start with the question of judicial ethics: Where was the justice’s error? He did not mention any pending case or litigation. He did not name any person or party. He did not discuss any specific political or moral matter. Most of the exchange consists of the filmmaker’s own goading remarks, followed by the justice’s vague and anodyne affirmations and replies. About what you might expect when cornered at a boring cocktail party.
Setting aside judicial ethics, I can think of two possible objections to what Justice Alito said: that he should not hold these views; or that he should not express them in public.
As to whether he should hold these views, I would suggest that they are not so extreme as to merit denunciation. On the contrary, they are reasonable, even commonplace.
Start with his remarks about polarization. Many people across the cultural divide contend that our political fractures involve intractably profound disagreements on which compromise is not possible. That does not mean that in all our disputes we are incapable of agreement (“there can be a way of working, living together peacefully”). But Justice Alito is hardly alone in the view that at least in the larger culture, many things are not amenable to compromise (“one side or the other is going to win”).
Likewise, many people in this country do believe in God and godliness. Many believe in the truth of our national motto, “In God We Trust.” They think religion contributes to a kinder and more moral society. And many of these people — including Justice Alito, to judge from his brief assent on the recording — also think that greater godliness might help the nation today. Americans who think God has something to teach us about decency and love and moral rectitude would be surprised to hear that treated as a shocking or extremist view.
Of course, those who do not believe in God may argue instead that godlessness or secularism is the surest path to becoming a better nation. Both are common, conventional and reasonable positions, however intense the disagreement between them.
As to whether Justice Alito should have expressed his views in public, one might claim that his assent to the filmmaker’s comments about a “return” to “godliness” was improper because it suggests that he would not treat secular parties fairly at the Supreme Court. But this argument assumes that a godly world has no room for peaceable tolerance for disagreement. And this is just what Justice Alito denied in suggesting that “living together peacefully” is a noble ambition toward which Americans should strive. Not only that: He was clear that the Supreme Court is not the place to resolve social and cultural fracture.
I recognize that most of this will not matter to many who are following this story. Those who dislike Justice Alito for other reasons will seize on what they can from this episode to condemn him. Indeed, this is presumably why the filmmaker went to such elaborate lengths to lie to him. Even so, nothing in Justice Alito’s comments merits the denunciation they are receiving, even if one disagrees with what he said. It is in the ginning up of the controversy that we see the realculture war.
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Portland, Ore. for the NYT
As Democrats make their case to voters around the country this fall, one challenge is that some of the bluest parts of the country — cities on the West Coast — are a mess.
Centrist voters can reasonably ask: Why put liberals in charge nationally when the places where they have greatest control are plagued by homelessness, crime and dysfunction?
I’ll try to answer that question in a moment, but liberals like me do need to face the painful fact that something has gone badly wrong where we’re in charge, from San Diego to Seattle. I’m an Oregonian who bores people at cocktail parties by singing the praises of the West, but the truth is that too often we offer a version of progressivism that doesn’t result in progress.
We are more likely to believe that “housing is a human right” than conservatives in Florida or Texas, but less likely to actually get people housed. We accept a yawning gulf between our values and our outcomes.
Conservatives argue that the problem is simply the left. Michael Shellenberger wrote a tough book denouncing what he called “San Fransicko” with the subtitle “Why Progressives Ruin Cities.” Yet that doesn’t ring true to me.
Democratic states enjoy a life expectancy two years longer than Republican states. Per capita G.D.P. in Democratic states is 29 percent higher than in G.O.P. states, and child poverty is lower. Education is generally better in blue states, with more kids graduating from high school and college. The gulf in well-being between blue states and red states is growing wider, not narrower.
So my rejoinder to Republican critiques is: Yes, governance is flawed in some blue parts of America, but overall, liberal places have enjoyed faster economic growth and higher living standards than conservative places. That doesn’t look like failure.
So the problem isn’t with liberalism. It’s with West Coast liberalism. (continued)
She first noticed the scent on her husband. Now her abilities are helping unlock new research in early disease detection.
By Scott Sayare in the NYT: Scott Sayare is a writer in New York. He interviewed doctors, researchers, caregivers and patients over several months for this article.
As a boy, Les Milne carried an air of triumph about him, and an air of sorrow. Les was a particularly promising and energetic young man, an all-Scottish swim champion, head boy at his academy in Dundee, a top student bound for medical school. But when he was young, his father died; his mother was institutionalized with a diagnosis of manic depression, and he and his younger brother were effectively left to fend for themselves. His high school girlfriend, Joy, was drawn to him as much by his sadness as his talents, by his yearning for her care. “We were very, very much in love,” Joy, now a flaxen-haired 72-year-old grandmother, told me recently. In a somewhat less conventional way, she also adored the way Les smelled, and this aroma of salt and musk, accented with a suggestion of leather from the carbolic soap he used at the pool, formed for her a lasting sense of who he was. “It was just him,” Joy said, a steadfast marker of his identity, no less distinctive than his face, his voice, his particular quality of mind.
Joy’s had always been an unusually sensitive nose, the inheritance, she believes, of her maternal line. Her grandmother was a “hyperosmic,” and she encouraged Joy, as a child, to make the most of her abilities, quizzing her on different varieties of rose, teaching her to distinguish the scent of the petals from the scent of the leaves from the scent of the pistils and stamens. Still, her grandmother did not think odor of any kind to be a polite topic of conversation, and however rich and enjoyable and dense with information the olfactory world might be, she urged her granddaughter to keep her experience of it to herself. Les only learned of Joy’s peculiar nose well after their relationship began, on a trip to the Scandinavian far north. Joy would not stop going on about the creamy odor of the tundra, or what she insisted was the aroma of the cold itself.
Joy planned to go off to university in Paris or Rome. Faced with the prospect of tending to his mother alone, however, Les begged her to stay in Scotland. He trained as a doctor, she as a nurse; they married during his residency. He was soon the sort of capable young physician one might hope to meet, a practitioner of uncommon enthusiasm, and shortly after his 30th birthday, he was appointed consultant anesthesiologist at Macclesfield District General Hospital, outside Manchester, in England, the first in his graduating class to make consultant.
The Milnes installed themselves in an ancient stone farmhouse high on a country hill in Cheshire. By then they had three young sons, and the edifice, which was old enough to be listed in the Domesday Book of 1086, was a happy, never-ending project. They threw elaborate, boozy dinner parties; they kept geese and hens and took in stray cats, dogs, a duck. “We just seemed to get on and do things,” Joy told me. Friends still liken her to Mary Poppins, part twinkly magic, part no frills practicality. She considers herself to be a “never-stop person,” she said. Her husband was the same.
Les spent long hours in the surgical theater, which in Macclesfield had little in the way of ventilation, and Joy typically found that he came home smelling of anesthetics, antiseptics and blood. But he returned one August evening in 1982, shortly after his 32nd birthday, smelling of something new and distinctly unsavory, of some thick must. From then on, the odor never ceased, though neither Les nor almost anyone but his wife could detect it. For Joy, even a small shift in her husband’s aroma might have been cause for distress, but his scent now seemed to have changed fundamentally, as if replaced by that of someone else. She thought he smelled vaguely of his mother. (continued)
Speaking at a campaign rally on Thursday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene warned that plans to build more wind turbines in the US would “send wind prices through the roof.”
“If you think you’re paying a lot for wind now, just wait until Biden starts building all the windmills he wants,” she said. “Joe Biden is coming for your wind!”
Painting a dark picture of the havoc wind power will wreak on the American consumer, she said, “It’s simple economics. If you have ten windmills, wind will cost ten times as much.”
In her most dire prediction, she declared, “Mark my words: You will be paying four dollars for a gallon of wind.”
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Ed note: Dr. Mehmet Oz has been an unfortunate voice hyping fat-burning supplements sending sales skyrocketing. He has been called to task by congress and has undergone searing critiques of his “flowery language” and health claims promoting questionable products. Unfortunately lobbyists have been successful in keeping supplements away from regulation by the FDA>
A multi-billion dollar myth by Dennis Benjamin (thanks to Ed M.)
In the world of food marketing, there is one attribute required to elevate a product to a super-food—the presence of antioxidants. Unfortunately, there is a dirty big secret. They do little or nothing. There is no scientific evidence that they benefit human health. Some have recently even suggested that they may cause more harm than good. Almost half the population in the USA takes supplements containing one or more antioxidants, such as Vitamin C and E—it is a multibillion-dollar business, all for naught.
Type ‘antioxidant’ into Google, and you get 444 million hits. The National Library of Medicine (PubMed) lists 24,379 articles, of which 4277 are clinical trials, and 516 have produced results, some of which are published. I confess that I did not read every one, but the overwhelming majority were studies focused on a single disease, and most used physiological measurements and not outcomes. I could not uncover large studies performed on the general population demonstrating the prevention of any disease or the delay of decay or death. The largest review showed increased mortality with some antioxidant supplements.
How did we get to the point that almost everyone believes that antioxidants are beneficial, from preventing cancer to slowing aging? It began in the mid-1940s as a purely theoretical idea. Being an oxygen-breathing species, we are vulnerable to rusting, and some oxygen molecules split to become ‘free radicals,’ aka reactive oxygen species (ROSs). These highly reactive molecules have both beneficial and potentially detrimental effects. It is somewhat like the phrase we use for the opposite sex—we can’t live with them, and we can’t live without them.
ROS functions in cell signaling, turning various vital cellular functions on and off. They also play crucial roles in cell metabolism, including photo-protection and stress tolerance. They are a normal product of all cells. However, they can also damage DNA, proteins, cell membranes, and other cellular components. This led some to hypothesize they may be responsible for aging and a host of human diseases. None of these hypotheses, including the aging paradigm, have ever been proven.
From its theoretical beginning, despite never being validated, the obvious extrapolation was ‘let’s get rid of them”. Our bodies already have a variety of systems readily available to scarf up these ROSs. The scientific terms for this activity are quench or scavenge. In the typical situation, there is a delicate balance between production and removal depending on the time and place within a cell. But what if that was not enough to remove them? How about adding more from our food or even better supplements and nutraceuticals? Thus, the ‘health’ food store shelves expanded their offerings, and an advertising avalanche convinced us that we could stay young forever. Power to the pomegranate, porcinis, and polypores. (continued)
Justice Samuel Alito at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on April 23, 2021. ERIN SCHAFF-POOL/GETTY IMAGES
Justice Samuel Alito spoke candidly about the ideological battle between the left and the right — discussing the difficulty of living “peacefully” with ideological opponents in the face of “fundamental” differences that “can’t be compromised.” He endorsed what his interlocutor described as a necessary fight to “return our country to a place of godliness.” And Alito offered a blunt assessment of how America’s polarization will ultimately be resolved: “One side or the other is going to win.”
Alito made these remarks in conversation at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner on June 3, a function that is known to right-wing activists as an opportunity to buttonhole Supreme Court justices. His comments were recorded by Lauren Windsor, a liberal documentary filmmaker. Windsor attended the dinner as a dues-paying member of the society under her real name, along with a colleague. She asked questions of the justice as though she were a religious conservative. Click here for the video link on X.
The justice’s unguarded comments highlight the degree to which Alito makes little effort to present himself as a neutral umpire calling judicial balls and strikes, but rather as a partisan member of a hard-right judicial faction that’s empowered to make life-altering decisions for every American.
The recording, which was provided exclusively to Rolling Stone, captures Windsor approaching Alito at the event and reminding him that they spoke at the same function the year before, when she asked him a question about political polarization. In the intervening year, she tells the justice, her views on the matter had changed. “I don’t know that we can negotiate with the left in the way that needs to happen for the polarization to end,” Windsor says. “I think that it’s a matter of, like, winning.”
“I think you’re probably right,” Alito replies. “On one side or the other — one side or the other is going to win. I don’t know. I mean, there can be a way of working — a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised. So it’s not like you are going to split the difference.”
Windsor goes on to tell Alito: “People in this country who believe in God have got to keep fighting for that — to return our country to a place of godliness.”
“I agree with you. I agree with you,” replies Alito, who authored the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which reversed five decades of settled law and ended a constitutional right to abortion. (continued)
Ed note: The stories and pictures of D-day remind me of my patient, Harold. He was one of the many heroes of that day, a day which affected his emotional well being until his life’s end. I wrote about Harold in Facing Death: Finding Dignity, Hope and Healing at the End.
I always looked forward to Harold’s visits. Harold knew that he had life threatening pulmonary fibrosis. He also knew that doctors didn’t have the faintest idea what was causing this, even though they used rather toxic medications to keep it under control. Prednisone seemed to work best.
Somehow, Harold forgave me for all the shortcomings of medical science. He liked to chat about his life during office visits: his grandson playing football at Notre Dame; his granddaughter who loved soccer; the holiday celebrations that were special in his family. Over time I thought I had gotten to know Harold pretty well. But did I, really?
He would come in cheerful and bubbling, with a tendency to wave off such symptoms as shortness of breath. His lungs were progressively filling with scar tissue, which blocked oxygen from getting into his blood effectively. A portable oxygen system helped, and Harold accepted it with grace. With his wife present we had some serious discussions about end-of-life questions, and he had completed an advance directive affirming that did not want to be placed on a breathing machine unless doctors were confident he could return to a meaningful existence. His wife would be in charge if he was unable to make decisions.
One day, during a routine visit in the office, I noted that Harold’s severe lung dysfunction had been quite stable for more than a year. “Harold,” I said casually, “you know you’re really lucky to still be alive.” I meant to be encouraging, but my patient burst into tears.
“What’s going on,” I said rather helplessly. “Did I say something wrong?”
“You don’t know how lucky I really am to be alive.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was a paratrooper on D-Day,” Harold said. “I came down behind the German lines like all my buddies. I didn’t know where I was or where they were. It was pure terror. I saw all these terrible things, and I shot a lot of people. It’s never out of my mind.”
I immediately realized my cluelessness. I didn’t know Harold well at all. Here was a true WWII hero trying to live a normal family life, trying to fight a serious illness, yet suffering from disabling post-traumatic stress disorder from fifty years past. Somehow, I hadn’t found a way to listen deeply enough.
Harold’s defenses took hold again rapidly.
“I’m sorry, Doctor. Sometimes it just grabs me.”
I tried to reach out and refer him for counseling, but Harold would have none of it. “Doc, it’s OK. I don’t want to see some shrink.”
In future office visits he continued to deflect questions about PTSD, though Harold’s wife confided that he had frequent night terrors, shouting in his sleep and awaking drenched with sweat.
Harold survived two more years until his pulmonary fibrosis finally caused his demise. I wish I could say that his death was peaceful, but as he weakened the terrors took hold and would not leave. Our palliative care team used enough sedation and narcotics to essentially put him in a medically induced coma. Harold’s PTSD didn’t really die until he did.
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Fridays 10:00am-2:00pm (June 7th through September 27th, minus July 5th)
9th Avenue between University and Seneca streets
Weekly First Hill Farmers Market at Virginia Mason is returning to a full summer schedule on 9th Avenue this summer! The First Hill community is welcomed to enjoy farm fresh produce, flowers, and delectable prepared food together. Each Friday from June 7th through September 27th (minus July 5th) Pike Place Market PDA, will coordinate a farmers market open to the public from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.
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Ed note: Should we rage against aging? At times of loss or illness, we might go down that path. Dylan Thomas in Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night points us in that direction. In contrast, the Beatles’ When I’m Sixty-Four raises questions about aging in a poignant humorous way. I hope you may appreciate the article below which reminds us that we might embrace aging.
As Evelyn Couch said to Ninny Threadgoode in Fannie Flagg’s “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe”: “I’m too young to be old and too old to be young. I just don’t fit anywhere.”
I think about this line often, this feeling of being out of place, particularly in a culture that obsessively glorifies youth and teaches us to view aging as an enemy.
No one really tells us how we’re supposed to age, how much fighting against it and how much acceptance of it is the right balance. No one tells us how we’re supposed to feel when the body grows softer and the hair grayer, how we’re supposed to consider the craping of the skin or the wrinkles on the face that make our smiles feel unfortunate.
The poet Dylan Thomas told us we should “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” that “old age should burn and rave at close of day.” He died, sadly, before turning 40.
For those of us well past that mark, rage feels futile, like a misallocation of energy. There is, after all, a beauty in aging. And aging is about more than how we look and feel in our bodies. It’s also about how the world around us plows ahead and pulls us along.
I remember a call, a few years ago, from a longtime friend who said it looked as if her father was about to pass away. I remember meeting her, along with another friend, at her father’s elder care facility so she wouldn’t have to be alone, and seeing the way her tears fell on his face as she stroked his cheeks and cooed his name; the way she collapsed in the hallway on our way out, screaming, not knowing if that night would be his last.
He survived, and has survived several near-death experiences since, but I saw my friend’s struggle with her father’s health difficulties as a precursor to what might one day be my struggle with my parents’ aging and health challenges. And it was.
Soon after that harrowing night at the elder care facility, my mother, who lives alone, suffered a stroke. Luckily, one of my brothers was having breakfast with her that morning and, noticing that her speech was becoming slurred, rushed her to the emergency room.
On the flight to Louisiana, I tried in vain to remain calm, not knowing what condition she would be in when I arrived, not knowing the damage the stroke had done. When I finally laid eyes on her, it was confirmed for me how fortunate we were that my brother had been alert and acted quickly. My mother would fully recover, but the image of her in that hospital bed — diminished from the commanding, invincible image of her that had been burned into my mind — shook me and has remained with me.
In that moment, I was reminded that my mother was in the final chapter of her life, and that I was moving into a new phase of mine.
That is one of the profound, emotional parts of aging: assuming a new familial role. Recognizing that my brothers and I were graduating from being the uncles to being the elders.
And that shifting family dynamic exerts itself on both ends, from above and below. This year, my older son turned 30. There’s no way to continue to consider yourself young when you have a child that age. He isn’t a father yet, but it has dawned on me that by the time I was his age, I had three children and my marriage was coming to an end. In fact, by the time I was his age, all of my mother’s grandchildren had been born.
No matter how young you may look or feel, time refuses to rest. It forges on. I’m now right around the age my parents were when I first considered them old.
I’m not sure when the world will consider me old — maybe it already does — but I do know that I’m no longer afraid of it. I welcome it. And I understand that the best parts of many books are their final chapters.
The actress Jenifer Lewis, appearing on the nationally syndicated radio show “The Breakfast Club,” once remarked: “I’m 61. I got about 30 more summers left.” Since hearing those words, I’ve thought of my own life in that way, in terms of how many summers I might have left. How many more times will I see the leaves sprout and the flowers bloom? How many more times will I spend a day by the pool or enjoy an ice cream on a hot day?
I don’t consider these questions because I’m worried, but because I want to remind myself to relish. Relish every summer day. Stretch them. Fill them with memories. Smile and laugh more. Gather with friends and visit family. Put my feet in the water. Grow things and grill things. I make my summers count by making them beautiful.
I have no intention of raging against my aging. I intend to embrace it, to embrace the muscle aches and the crow’s feet as the price of growing in wisdom and grace; to understand that age is not my body forsaking me but my life rewarding me.
Aging, as I see it, is a gift, and I will receive it with gratitude.
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Seventy-seven years ago, on June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who had been a five-star general in World War II, gave a commencement speech at Harvard University.
Rather than stirring, the speech was bland. Its long sentences were hard to follow. It was vague. And yet, in just under eleven minutes on a sunny afternoon, Marshall laid out a plan that would shape the modern world.
“The truth of the matter is that Europe’s requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products—principally from America—are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character,” he said. “It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”
In his short speech, Marshall outlined the principles of what came to be known as the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe in the wake of the devastation of World War II. The speech challenged European governments to work together to make a plan for recovery and suggested that the U.S. would provide the money. European countries did so, forming the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) in 1948. From 1948 to 1952, the U.S. would donate about $17 billion to European countries to rebuild, promote economic cooperation, and modernize economies. By the end of the four-year program, economic output in each of the countries participating in the Marshall Plan had increased by at least 35%. (continued)
The emergency legislation will take effect immediately after being signed by the Mayor
From the Seattle City Council Blog — thanks to Ann M. who notes, “Let’s hope the old Prosch House @ 9th & Cherry will soon be demolished.”
SEATTLE – The Seattle City Council unanimously passed legislation today that would allow the Seattle Fire Department (SFD) to swiftly order the demolition or remediation of unsafe vacant buildings that pose risks to public safety. The bill was sponsored by Councilmembers Bob Kettle (District 7, Downtown to Magnolia) and Tammy J. Morales (Yesler Terrace to Rainier Beach).
“The inability to demolish these hazards has contributed to a permissive environment where government stands by as predictable accidents and crimes occur,” said Councilmember Kettle. “Today, the Council took decisive action to change that. This legislation will substantially address the issue of dangerous vacant buildings. We owe it to our brave firefighters and our neighbors to take a proactive approach, so they don’t have to endanger their lives to put out fires at vacant buildings.”
“Fires in derelict buildings have become a dangerous hazard across the City, especially in District 2. Between 2022-23 there were over 60 fires between Yesler Terrace and Rainier Beach, and someone tragically lost their life,” said Councilmember Morales. “This legislation marks a turning point. I’m heartened that we passed this bill, as it’s something that I’ve been working on for over a year in partnership with the Seattle Fire Department, Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections, and the City Attorney’s office. Thank you to Councilmember Kettle, the Mayor, and my colleagues for supporting this critical, life-saving bill.”
When thousands of athletes move into the Olympic Village on the outskirts of Paris next month, they’ll be staying in buildings that were ultimately designed for another use: to become part of a sustainable new neighborhood. It’s the opposite of what has happened in previous Olympics, when cities have tried to figure out what to do with relics of the Games as an afterthought.
“It’s not that we’re reusing things and transforming them into housing,” says architect and urban planner Anne Mie Depuydt, founder of the design firm UAPS, who served as the coordinating architect for one section of the Olympic Village. “It’s a new neighborhood, and we made sure that within the apartments and the office buildings we can adapt them to receive the athletes for the Olympics.”
Thank Uncle Sam for Cheetos, air fryers, and other modern mainstays.
BY DIANA HUBBELL(thanks to Mary M.) in Atlas Obscura
Whether invented at the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Systems Center or by subcontracted private companies, many processed foods now common in civilian life were first created by and for the military-industrial complex.
SPAM: Hormel Foods Corporation invented the world’s most famous canned meat in 1937 to offload a surplus of pork shoulder. SPAM, for “spiced ham,” took off in a big way, though, when the U.S. military purchased 150 million pounds of the stuff for troops during World War II. Since then, the processed meat has become ubiquitous around the world wherever the U.S. has a strong military presence. From the Philippines to Okinawa, Guam to South Korea, SPAM has since grown to become an integrated—and often celebrated—part of the local cuisine.
M&Ms: During the Spanish Civil War, Forrest Mars Sr. encountered soldiers eating chocolates shielded from heat by a brittle sugar shell. After obtaining a patent for candy that “melts in your mouth, not in your hands” in 1941, the Mars candy company began selling M&Ms exclusively to the U.S. military.
Air Fryers: The first forced-convection oven, better known as an air fryer, was a 35-pound, 120-volt Maxson Whirlwind Oven, invented in 1945. William Maxson, a former U.S. Navy midshipman, invented the device to heat up to six meals at a time. When the military lost interest, he turned to civilian American households and Pan Am Airways. After his unexpected death in 1947, the technology languished, appearing in various formats over the years. In 2008, air fryers finally hit the mainstream big time, thanks to Philips.
Microwave Ovens: It sounds like an urban myth, but the microwave oven really was invented by accident. During World War II, a Raytheon engineer named Percy LeBaron Spencer was fiddling with an active radar when he noticed that it had melted his candy bar. By 1945, Raytheon had filed for a patent and by 1947, it had built a working microwave oven: a refrigerator-sized behemoth called the Radarange.
Freeze-Dried Fruit: Jacques-Arsene d’Arsonval invented freeze-drying technology in France in 1906, but originally it was primarily used to preserve blood serum during war. Later Natick Labs would take the technology and run with it to create lighter, shelf-stable foods for space travel for NASA.
Cheetos: All sorts of processed cheese products have directly or indirectly come out of the U.S. military’s efforts. After dehydrated cheese powder was developed in 1943 by a USDA scientist, the military stocked up on the stuff and wound up with a giant surplus post-World War II. They sold off bunches of it to Frito-Lay in 1948, which started frying them up into the familiar knobbly snacks.
Instant Coffee: Satori Kato, a Japanese-American chemist, came up with a stable water soluble coffee powder in 1901, but the product boomed thanks to the U.S. military purchasing 37,000 pounds a day of it during wartime.
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